“Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, when they stood upon the quay. “I feel like the widow Twankay myself.”
Sylvia remembered her ambition to visit the East, when she herself wore a yashmak in Open Sesame: here it was fulfilling perfectly her most daring hopes.
Mrs. Gainsborough was relieved to find a comparatively European hotel, and next morning after a long sleep she was ready for any adventure.
“Sylvia!” she suddenly screamed when they were being jostled in the crowded bazaar. “Look, there’s a camel coming toward us! Did you ever hear such a hollering and jabbering in all your life? I’m sure I never did. Mrs. Marsham and her camel at the Zoo. Tut-tut-tut! Do you suppose Mrs. Marsham ever saw a camel coming toward her in the street like a cab-horse might? Certainly not. Why, after this there’s nothing in her story. It’s a mere anecdote.”
They wandered up to the outskirts of the prison, and saw a fat Jewess being pushed along under arrest for giving false weight. She made some resistance in the narrow entrance, and the guard planted his foot in the small of her back, so that she seemed suddenly to crumple up and fall inside.
“Well, I’ve often said lightly ‘what a heathen’ or ‘there’s a young heathen,’ but that brings it home to one,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, gravely.
Sylvia paid no attention to her companion’s outraged sympathy. She was in the East where elderly obese Jewesses who gave false weight were well treated thus. She was living with every moment of rapturous reality the dreams of wonder that the Arabian Nights had brought her in youth. Yet Tangier was only a gateway to enchantments a hundredfold more powerful. She turned suddenly to Mrs. Gainsborough and asked her if she could stay here while she rode into the interior.
“Stay here alone?” Mrs. Gainsborough exclaimed. “Not if I know it.”
This plan of Sylvia’s to explore the interior of Morocco was narrowed down ultimately into riding to Tetuan, which was apparently just feasible for Mrs. Gainsborough, though likely to be rather fatiguing.
A dragoman was found, a certain Don Alfonso reported to be comparatively honest. He was an undersized man rather like the stump of a tallow candle into which the wick has been pressed down by the snuffer, for he was bald and cream-colored, with a thin, uneven black mustache and two nodules on his forehead. His clothes, too, were crinkled like a candlestick. He spoke French well, but preferred to speak English, of which he only knew two words, “all right”; this often made his advice unduly optimistic. In addition to Don Alfonso they were accompanied by a Moorish trooper and a native called Mohammed.